It is typical for customers to enter into a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with a software service provider. An SLA agreement generally defines a minimum standard of service that the software service provider must meet, and usually describe penalties, such as monetary fines, if the provider fails to meet the minimum standard of service. The SLA agreement may also indicate additional payments from the customer to the software service provider if the service provider greatly exceeds the minimum standard of service. For example, the SLA could indicate that: (i) a company's computer servers must have a minimum 98% uptime, (ii) all high level problem tickets must be resolved in an average of 8 hours, and (iii) work must begin on all problem tickets no later than one hour after reported.
Regarding the problem tickets, it is common for IT departments to use Service Management Software such as IBM's Maximo to monitor a status of all problem tickets at a predefined time interval. Thus, for example, the software may confirm on a 10-minute interval, whether there are any problem tickets that were opened more than 30 minutes ago, that are not assigned to any work group. If the software finds such a problem ticket, the software can be configured to automatically assign it to a work group so that the work group can resolve the associated problem.
As an example, the following three SQL statements below determines if there are any problem tickets that were opened more than 30 minutes ago (by looking at the REPORTDATE field) that have yet to be assigned (status=‘NEW’):
[Nov. 18, 2007 15:00:00:000 CST] 0000002f SystemOut O 18 Nov. 2007 15:00:00:000 [INFO] USER=(MAXADMIN) (INCIDENT):select*from incident where (orgid=‘EAGLENA’) and reportdate<={ts ‘Nov. 18, 2007 14:30:00’} and status=‘NEW’
[Nov. 18, 2007 15:10:00:000 CST] 0000002f SystemOut O 18 Nov. 2007 15:10:00:000 [INFO] USER=(MAXADMIN) (INCIDENT):select*from incident where (orgid=‘EAGLENA’) and reportdate<={ts ‘Nov. 18, 2007 14:40:00’} and status=‘NEW’
[Nov. 18, 2007 15:20:00:000 CST] 0000002f SystemOut O 18 Nov. 2007 15:20:00:000 [INFO] USER=(MAXADMIN) (INCIDENT):select*from incident where (orgid=‘EAGLENA’) and reportdate<={ts ‘Nov. 18, 2007 14:50:00’} and status=‘NEW’
Because the conditions checked by the Service Management Software may be set up manually, there is a possibility that a user may incorrectly enter in the criteria, based on a miscommunication or a mistake. For example, if a user changes the software configuration to check for problem tickets that were opened more than an hour ago (instead of 30 minutes ago), the user modification could result in the SLA being breached resulting in possible financial penalties.
Accordingly, the inventors herein have recognized that it would be desirable to automatically determine whether log file records associated with SLA commands have command-related attributes that have been modified by a user. This occurs when the log file commands have command-related attributes that differ from command-related attributes in a previous pattern of log file commands in a log file. Further, the inventors herein have recognized that it would be desirable to notify another user when log file records have command-related attributes that have been modified by the user.